Jeff Carter

Come on, Kirk. You should be able to present your dismissals without resorting to wild hyperbole or yet again dredging up the Clinton / Fluornoy matter (to which I offered at the time to present a dozen sources which informed my offhand statement). Who said “writers are being paid off by some totalitarian bureaucracy”? I suggested there appears to be some orchestration without then theorizing about deep-state paymasters. Orchestration has been a hallmark of support for the official story and attacks on the critics since the WR was released. Or do you propose that three separate writers got out of bed one recent day and decided to write about the Garrison-Shaw trial, homophobia, and the new Oliver Stone documentary which was at the time (quietly) said to be in production? It’s a nominally free society, so critics of the critics are fully part of the story here, and if they can get their work published or lauded in the MSM then that is simply their advantage. That they feel their points are best supported with shrill insults and dire association… that’s been the style since 1964. You saw it too - the fallback limited hangout acknowledging at least cover-up in JFKA was field-tested on “Face The Nation” back in 2013, but evidently is not yet ready for prime time so out come the QAnon slurs.

And yet… two new books this year (Litwin, Long) and the Wiener Rolling Stone hatchet job can be said to have been written anticipating the JFK Revisited documentary would be largely concerned with the Garrison-Shaw case in New Orleans, based on the doc’s working title “Destiny Betrayed” and DiEugenio’s role as writer. And then a self-referential universe of Facebook pages, op-eds, and Twitter comments appear promoting these views. The attempts to associate JFKA research with Q-Anon, Russian trolls, covid deniers, Trump supporters, etc etc echo similar items from five years ago penned by Alexandra Zapruder and Joyce Carol Oates. A common thread amongst all the above is the presence of Max Holland - as a mentor, author of cited works, and promoter of the dated sponsored book on the Garrison trial “American Grotesque”, with its homophobia plot line. It’s fairly obvious the American establishment remains deeply concerned this genie gets out of the bottle, and the damage control remains equal parts ignoring the topic, promoting ridiculous counter-theories, and smearing the critics. Yet at the end of the day all they have is the insistence that Oswald really did hit that “million in one shot”, as Wiener put it, which is the supposition which JFK Revisited, and all the work which preceded and informed it, destroys.

LOL - the Z223-224 “lapel flap”! Haven’t seen that one for a while. This is going to be equivalent to a Nickelodeon subscription: laugh-riot reruns from the Golden Age of Lone Nuttery.

Obviously Mr Litwin is this go-round’s designated Posner / Bugliosi. It’s amusing that the effort stumbled out of the gate producing/sponsoring books on the assumption the new Stone film would be focussed largely on Garrison/Shaw/New Orleans… whoops. Just to note, his claim the backyard photos were “conclusively” proven legitimate is completely incorrect. The HSCA, like the FBI before it, acknowledged that the technical possibility of a facial replacement at the chin line could not be proved or disproved.

Jim, fantastic job! I remember you presenting a multi-part “Reclaiming History” critique on BOR a dozen years ago or so, and as you discussed the new-releases info which effectively cancelled Bugliosi’s talking points, you would often exclaim “someone should do a documentary on this stuff!” Well, it’s finally here and couldn’t have been done any better. While I look forward to the complete version, the two-hour cut assembles a lot of information very effectively. I trust it will reach a wide audience, and particularly promote interest and inspiration to a younger generation.

hi Kirk it seemed to me that all the nuts were already at the rally, and the Capitol authorities had the means and manpower to quickly regain control if they chose to do so. Most of the people inside the Capitol building were doing little more than taking selfies, which may have appeared chaotic but was not “destabilizing”. Trump is ultimately responsible for the killing of the Iranian general, and the others nearby, which was a serious breach of international law. But the US does not recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC and so he will never be prosecuted for that. Otherwise, Trump’s legal position is an internal US domestic issue which I have no opinion. It is my understanding that the NYC business milieu in which Trump operates is corrupt. However, the US legal system is designed to prevent “fishing expeditions” by legal authority, and a specific legal case against Trump has not yet been presented.

I hadn’t been following this “coup” narrative until just these last days. All the narrative threads have been crafted and disseminated by the same media interests who presented the Russiagate lies, using the exact same methods. The Trump campaign telegraphed that it was planning to use legal avenues to challenge results months ahead of last year’s election. The efforts ultimately went nowhere because the court filings showed they had no case. Trump’s lawyers drew up legal schemes, based on sketchy interpretations of Electoral procedures, and those efforts also went nowhere, because the schemes relied on participation by people like Pence who could not be convinced there was any merit to the advice. So the legal and legislative foundation of the US political system worked as expected and was never under any kind of threat. Yet a coup narrative has been spun out of nothing. Trump’s ineffective legal advisors met at a local hotel last December, and now the WaPo is describing their meetings as taking place in a “command bunker” or a “war room.” That’s ridiculous, but also irresponsible and manipulative. An angry mob bursts into the Capitol - to do what? What happened? Nothing did, a procedure was delayed for a few hours, and then it proceeded and the US democratic system remained intact, and was actually never seriously challenged or threatened. The mob had no plan and was following no plan, they had their temper tantrum and then dissipated. Yet all these shameless stories of the republic teetering on a precipice, based mostly on empty boasts or harebrained aspirations expressed by persons who had no power or influence. The result will be new legislation restricting public access to federal buildings and more police powers to target what is now called “Domestic Terrorism”, definition of which will be ambiguous. The new powers will be directed at political dissent and activists - as it always has been, but to a greater degree and with less Constitutional civil rights protections. Protest events such as the March on the Pentagon back in 1967 will never happen again, and any attempt to do so will see the organizers facing long prison terms.

Leaving aside the fact that the Eastman legal advice, dodgy and hare-brained as it may be, does not in any way constitute a “coup plan”, you have in the months previous theorized an alternate concept, which I referred, relying on an incapacitation or removal of Pence from the scene. Here is a sampling of your posts: “a coup plan to block Pence from certifying the election results by having the Secret Service move hm to Andrews AFB on January 6th.” “…a Trump plot to physically remove him from the Capitol on January 6th” “… a deliberate effort to prevent the certification of the election and possibly assault or even murder (Pence).” “…ancillary Trump plan may have involved creating a pretext to remove Mike Pence from the Capitol” What I am noticing generally, as with Russiagate threads (where you are on record often praising and endorsing the Steele Dossier), is the theorizing is derived from matters that are wildly misrepresented, based on hyperbolic supposition, or made up entirely. Often cued from mainstream media reports. It does not contribute to a healthy or informed political culture. And yet on other topics you are entirely articulate and informed…

As can be seen by referring to actual statute rather than being triggered by MSM hyperbole, a concept of a “coup attempt” based on preventing Pence from certifying the election seems equally dodgy, despite five months of breathless speculation on this and another similar thread, twitter, etc: 1) the fixed date for the certification process can be changed 2) once the process has begun, there is no fixed time by which it must conclude 3) should the vice-president be somehow incapacitated, then the certification is to be led by the next person in the line of succession aka the Speaker of the House who is Nancy Pelosi. So, is this right?: the plan was to use unruly mob to attack the Congress, force Pence to postpone the certification, have the Secret Service remove him to Andrews airfield and then on to Alaska, so that Nancy Pelosi could then declare Trump the president?

You are misrepresenting my position. I fully agree the events of 1/6 constituted a major and serious breach of security, but it was not a fundamental “attack on democracy”. This framing has been largely manufactured by the corporate media to increase partisan division and rancour, very successfully if one consults the past few months on this thread. By definition, dodgy legal advice does not amount to a “coup” attempt. A coup is an “unlawful” (or “unconstitutional”) seizure of power. Using legal gambits based on interpretations of legal statutes is technically best described these days as “lawfare”. The election in 2000 was a result of lawfare supported by the Supreme Court, and was entirely legal. Trump’s lawyers were trying to find legal avenues to reversing electoral results, but their schemes were obviously hare-brained and were never acted upon.

Well, according to the “Eastman memo”, to the extent anyone takes it seriously, the “coup plan” was actually dependent on the certification process moving forward, at which time the scheme to swap out electors from various states would be enacted. Pence received exactly the same heavy security as Pelosi, to which she said she never felt in danger. Whether the Secret Service wanted to move him to Andrews or not, the eventual certification of the election was never endangered either. The MSM accounts are filled with emotive adverbs and phrases such as “harrowing” or “terror at the Capital” which - as field tested at Fox News - trigger response at a level below rational dispassionate discourse. Certainly Trump is a malignant narcissist, and his continuing promotion of an alleged “stolen election” is astonishingly irresponsible. Beyond that, a cynical observer might say this boils down to a dispute between rival factions of millionaires over who gets to craft the next round of tax cuts for their friends and “donors”.

Dodgy never-acted-on legal advice does not really constitute a cogent “plan”, and claims that it “outlined a coup d’état” is simply a manifestation of the hyper-partisan “news reporting” discussed earlier in context of Fox News.

What is the "coup plan" and how does one access it?

Trump's personal opinions had no bearing on the certification and, as far as I know, there are no rules or laws which mandate that the certification process must proceed at an exact time or else the election is voided.

After the Court refused to intervene and the Congress refused to overturn the Electoral College, there was no means for Trump or his supporters to overturn the election result or otherwise seize power. As far as I know, there is no rule mandating an election certification at a precise time or else the previous guy gets to be president again. I suppose Buffalo Horns and his friends could have proclaimed a new government while they were in the rotunda but, unlike the Ukraine where very powerful and influential foreign interests had the clout to bestow “legitimacy” to an unconstitutional transfer of power, I cannot imagine any diplomatic support for such a move in D.C. back in January or at anytime. Objectively then, there was no possibility of a successful coup, but there has been a very obvious campaign to generate emotional responses from the general public over something that could not have happened, led by politicians who in other circumstances had no principle regard for constitutional procedures or democracy, at least in other countries.

The tripartite separation of powers in the U.S. federal system requires a 2/3 majority to assume or presume nominal control. In January 2021 Trump was in last weeks of a lame-duck Executive, with no Congressional or Court support for his claims of irregular election practices. There was therefore no constitutional avenue to a second Trump term, and an insurrection led by characters such as Mr Buffalo Horns had realistically no chance to reverse that fact. Claims of a supposed coup attempt have yet to describe a process by which this coup would be at all feasible.

The firings and resignations were about the breach of the building, not specific to the security issues of #2 and #3 within the federal gov’t structure. I’m not a security expert, but had occasion to work beside a federal Canadian opposition party leader both before and after an election call which could have resulted in his becoming the PM. The difference in security between the two occasions was very noticeable and markedly more “serious”. Can’t help but extrapolate from that what should be expected, under the specific circumstances, for #2 and #3 of the world’s sole superpower. I haven’t seen much informed discussion of Pence or Pelosi’s experiences in context of the security and their position in the nation’s chain of command, despite their proximity to the rabble being the primary and most immediate security issue. I do see that Pelosi did in fact receive the security expected, as she told USA Today in April “I was never personally afraid because I had so much security for myself”. That seems to underline that Pence’s experience was either not at the expected level, or certain widely disseminated accounts have been a bit loose with the actual facts. The security breach which did occur was limited to a building, while the integrity of the US political system was never under any direct threat or danger. Trump did make an attempt to utilize the Supreme Court to switch the election result, like what occurred in 2000, but it was unsuccessful and after that there was no realistic means to realize that goal. So, just my observation, the hand-wringing over the alleged coup attempt is an orchestration leading towards new legislation further restricting the expression of grievances and the right to petition the government.

I still have my DVD copy of Robert Greenwald’s 2004 documentary Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism. The film charts the rise of Fox News in the wake of the loss of the Fairness Doctrine, and the development of a news product informed by top-down partisan editorial lines, exemplified by Roger Ailes’ “Second Floor” memos. Fox News was still something of an outlier at the time the film was made, but its blurry news/editorial mash, partisan spin, and manufactured (non) stories are today commonplace across the corporate news media. Buyer beware. As per the 1/6 “attack on democracy”: the dog that doesn’t bark for me is the glaring lack of security for Pence and Pelosi, both of whom were in the direct line of succession for the federal government, in fact #2 and #3 respectively. I cannot fathom how either were allowed to be close to any degree of threat or danger, or how the fact that either supposedly were has not resulted in a massive review of security and attendant resignations. Lacking such response is a clue that this is mostly a public relations exercise which will predictably end in new legislation broadly curtailing protest and dissent in general under the rubric of preventing “domestic terrorism”. It’s also useful to recall that many of the Congressional figures expressing outrage and dismay over the 1/6 events have long supported US government programs which have harnessed political violence directed towards adversary governments in diverse places such as Nicaragua and Hong Kong (Pelosi praised HK protesters after they trashed the city’s legislature in summer of 2019). In fact, the 2014 coup in Kiev was almost a carbon copy of the future event in D.C. with a right-wing mob storming the parliament intent on inflicting violence on the legislators within who were voting on a matter with which the mob disagreed. The difference being the mob was successful in 2014, managing to halt the vote, chase the politicians out of the building, and have their self-declared new government deemed “legitimate” - by the Obama State Department - within a few hours.

You might want to review that assertion. Hudson clearly disputes the notion of such partisan divide. It may be more accurate to state that most voters are left to “vote against their stated interests.” Hudson posted a follow-up this AM, again reviewing the results of last week’s compromises. The Democrat establishment watered down the entire progressive agenda which Biden campaigned on, and then added a $450 billion tax giveaway on expensive homes and neutered proposed Medicare reforms on drug prices. Previously, an initiative led by Democrat senators added $10 billion to the Defence budget, which had already been subject to increases this year over last. “…the new BBB bill has been distorted into something quite different than what was described until last week. The largest element grafted onto it is the $450 billion tax cut for wealthy homeowners, raising the SALT property tax deductibility in East Coast Democratic states from $10,000 to $72,500. This giveaway is promoted by the same “centrists” who are blocking approval of the BBB because it will “add to the budget deficit… Over the weekend we have learned how drastically the early promise of fiscal savings for Medicare drug purchases has been drastically watered down…So much for the Blue Dogs’ crocodile tears about the federal budget deficit! Complaining about adding to the deficit is a “tell” that they will continue to oppose pro-labor, pro-consumer policies. They never raise this concern when it comes to military appropriations or tax cuts for the One Percent.” Michael Hudson - “Did the Squad Give Away Their Bargaining Power?” https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/09/did-the-squad-give-away-their-bargaining-power/

Veteran observer Jack Rasmus saw the same things as Hudson did - with the ultimate de-coupling of the Infrastructure and Reconciliation bills the “coup d’grace”: “How Democrat Progressives Got Out-Maneuvered by Their Corporate Wing” https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/08/how-democrat-progressives-got-out-maneuvered-by-their-corporate-wing/ The theory that the Dem leadership really wanted to go along with their progressive friends but just couldn’t “assemble a real consensus” is belied by the list of machinations and legislative compromises, which undermines the notion that two rather mediocre legislators were simply successful in overwhelming the party’s true intent: “Why not simply remove Manchin from his committee memberships, and stop federal subsidy of his West Virginia constituency? Instead, they have put him in charge of the environment bill, which he has disfigured on behalf of the lobbying money he receives from the oil and coal sectors.” Hudson’s observation that the Dem’s leadership is beholden to the Party’s “donor class” is far more useful to developing an objective perspective than a crude reduction of events to unfortunate unforeseen circumstances. What can be recognized here is, at least in a duopoly system (no viable third parties), the Dem’s must rely on their progressive wing to win, but won’t let them influence policy. The withdrawal or withholding of the “progressive vote” in response will largely determine whether big blow-outs in 2022 and 2024 are ahead. (The same happened in 1946, after the progressive wing was screwed at Convention in 1944). Remember, the true purpose of Russiagate was to prevent or forestall a forensic analysis of why Clinton lost in 2016. The consequences of that have now been made manifest. I suspect this is informing the constant "1/6 attack on our democracy" meme.

Economist Michael Hudson really let it rip this past week with a detailed breakdown of the compromises associated with the Biden infrastructure bill, where the progressive impulse cultivated by the Democratic Party collapsed into a series of tax giveaways directed to the Dem’s donor constituency. Hudson writes caustically that the institutional “Democratic role is to protect the Republican party from challenges from the left.” “The current Democratic impasse shows that no progress can be made without changing the institutional structure of American politics. It seems that the only way to do this is to make sure that the Democratic Party loses so irrevocably in 2022 and 2024 that it is dissolved enough to enable the Progressives to revive the near corpse.” Michael Hudson - Is This the End of the Unreformable Democratic Party? https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/05/is-this-the-end-of-the-unreformable-democratic-party/

CounterPunch was once reliable for an anti-conspiracy editorial line which was often expressed with mocking sarcasm. This seems to have changed, as they recently ran a solid interview with Oliver Stone and now present a piece by Jason Hornberger which is unabashed in presenting a knowledgeable researcher POV: “What The CIA Is Hiding in the JFK Assassination Records” https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/04/what-the-cia-is-hiding-in-the-jfk-assassination-records/ “What the Pentagon and the CIA learned from the era of the ARRB is that the community of assassination researchers is composed of some very smart people. By analyzing the evidence that the ARRB was succeeding in getting released, assassination researchers were able to put together the pieces of the puzzle that established a fraudulent autopsy, along with lots of other pieces of circumstantial evidence establishing that what occurred on November 22, 1963, was a highly sophisticated national-security state regime-change operation.”

Coincidentally - or not - Alexandra Zapruder's 2016 book also uses American Grotesque as the lens by which she views the Garrison/Shaw trial. What's the deal with the Kirkwood book? I understand it was first published in 1970, and then reprinted in 1992 presumably in response to Stone's JFK. Not currently in print - is it scholarly distinguished or does it otherwise hold some vague abstract totemic power for critics of the critics? I had never previously heard of it.

Jim - might a licensing dispute with Sixth Floor affect the exhibition of the documentary? Usually film producers/distributors have their own legal teams working on clearances , so was it a decision to bypass Sixth Floor permission? (you don’t have to answer that 2nd question) I understand the issues of the Zapruder family getting “market value” for the film both in 1963 and 1999 - it is America after all - but the film was in fact “evidence” in a extremely high-profile murder investigation and so the official lazy acceptance of the film as “private property”, particularly during the 1960s, is rather baffling. After the latter day settlement, the film should have gone to the National Archives instead of Sixth Floor, and it is unclear why the Zapruder family got to make that call. Unlike the Archives, the Sixth Floor is not a neutral body and they should not be retaining copyright to the film. There should no longer be a copyright after the settlement. The problem, of course, is the proceeds of high licensing fees go to support a rather one-sided and, most here agree, factually incorrect presentation of events at the museum. Plus there is the negative role the museum has played in the past through policing informational displays in Dealey Plaza.

My interpretation of Noonan’s commentary Nov 2013 is as a tacit acknowledgement of an official cover-up of the true circumstances of JFK’s death. Her claim that the persons responsible for the cover-up were in fact “patriots” reflects a further tacit acknowledgment that the assassins were acting for and cultivated by persons on the domestic right. The argument would be that a true accounting would have split the country wide open and dangerously weaken if not fatally undermine national security in the midst of an ongoing existential Cold War. Therefore the cover-up was necessary and appropriate and saved the union. I wonder if persons such as Earl Warren, or others of the liberal establishment, thought the same at the time. LBJ’s supposed WW3 scenario may have been more about the above than any purported Russian sponsorship of the JFKA. Noonan’s comments, then, were a trial run for the ultimate fallback exonerating the Warren Commission, but apparently 2013 was still too early in the game to acknowledge fault, so her comments were a bit of an outlier at that time.